Who Killed The Vidarbha Farmers?

Farmers’ suicides in remote parts of the country have a way of appearing in and disappearing from our national media and national consciousness. With suicides, mainly by cotton farmers in Maharashtra’s Vidarbharegion, hitting an all-time high of over 710 since June last year, the political establishment was forced to take some note. The Prime Minister himself called a meeting in June and asked to visit the six affected districts of Vidarbha. He traveled there on June 30 and July 1 when the suicide tally read 574; since his visit and announcement of a Rs 3750 crore relief package, over 90 suicides have been reported in a single month.

As cold statistics keep piling up – Vidarbha follows a pattern seen in Andhra Pradhesh, Kerala, Karnataka, Punjab – and the national media chooses an occasional fleeting moment to throw its spotlight on the crisis, there is one man who has been consistently highlighting the heart-breaking grimness of the issues involved: award-winning journalist-author P. Sainath who has been tracking "the suicide story" for over six years now. Sainath, who works as Rural Affairs Editor ofThe Hindu is based in Mumbai but has reported on rural distress and agrarian crisis since 1993-94 in various publications. He has traveled thousands of kilometers across states for research and reporting on these issues and spent considerable time in the districts of Anantapur, Mahbubnagar, Nalgonda, Medak, Nizamabad, Adilabad, Ranga Reddy in Andhra Pradesh; mainly Wayanad district in Kerala; Yavatmal, Amravati, Akola, Buldhana, Wardha in Maharashtra; as also parts of western Orissa and Rajasthan.

For his work on rural distress including farmers’ suicides, Sainath has received highly prestigious national and international awards including the United Nations FAO Boerma Prize and the Harry Chapin award earlier this year. Not surprisingly, the award money has been ploughed back in various ways to alleviate some part of the suffering of the scores of distressed families he has written about; it’s a little-known facet of his work. "The level of distress in rural households is nearly the same everywhere," he says, "the only difference between a suicide and non-suicide household is the loss of the breadwinner. We are not even beginning to address the distress." No wonder then that, given his research and datasheets of the last many years, the Prime Minister asked for an exclusive one-on-one briefing in June 22nd evening at the PM’s Race Course Road residence, where his Vidarbha visit took shape. Sainath was realistic enough to know that the relief package announced on July 1 would not make a major difference to the lives or futures of the indebted farmers, but even he is now distressed by the unstoppable tally of suicides.

Here, Sainath talks to Smruti Koppikar, Outlook Bureau Chief in Mumbai, on a gamut of issues from suicides to agrarian crisis and gradual corporatisation of Indianagriculture.

Smruti Kopikar: It’s been over a month since the PM visited Vidarbha. This period saw anunprecedented level of farmers’ suicides: nearly 90 in July alone. Obviously,the PM’s relief package did not mean much. What is your interpretation of thespate of suicides?

P. Sainath: Whatever the rhetoric at the top, nothing has really changed on the ground.To begin with, by the time the PM came, the sowing season had ended and therewas an absolute lack of credit. It’s one thing for the farmer if he has sownbut it turns out to be a bad crop and so on, but to not sow at all means anabject and utter sense of failure and defeat for him. This year many farmersjust couldn’t sow; they were indebted many times over. Then, there’s thewhole sense of being let down because there was such a huge expectancy build-upto the visit. Farmers really believed that the PM would do for them what theirown chief minister and (union) agriculture minister have not done in the lastfew years, but there was little to cheer in the PM’s package. Forget thepackage, no one can tell what happened to the Rs 50 lakh that the PM left behindfor each of the six districts; at least that could have been put to immediateuse but clearly wasn’t. We can only hope that the numbers will now taper off.

Mr Sharad Pawar, it seems, is the Board of Cricket Control in India (BCCI)chief first and union agriculture minister later. At least that’s what adinner invitation to honour him recently in Chennai wanted us to believe. Heapparently had no objection to being introduced in this manner, so the BCCIchief is clearly the more ascendant part of his function. In any case, cricketis more profitable than subsistence level agriculture. But, there are other waysin which he is undermining the debate altogether. A cabinet colleague of hismentioned sometime back that there were decisions that could not be takenbecause the agriculture minister was not present. Mr Pawar has missed cabinetmeetings on agricultural issues at a time when farm sector crisis was that bigbut he did make the time to attend meetings on cricket at Doha and Qatar andelsewhere.

Beyond all this, what’s disturbing is the insidious ways in which his "ministry"- who in the ministry is what I would like to know - is consistently underminingthe recommendations of the National Commission on Farmers (NCF) and thepolitical games he’s playing in Vidarbha. For example, the NCF suggested longback that import duty on cotton should be raised. It wouldn’t -- or shouldn’t-- cost the government anything, yet the agriculture minister is unwilling toincrease it to any level from the current 10 per cent. He seems loathe to bringin a Price Stabilisation Fund for cotton, the way we have for oil, that was alsosuggested by the NCF. And, it’s open knowledge that he opposed tooth-and-nailthe idea of a loan waiver for indebted cotton farmers though he never opposessubsidies for sugarcane farmers and now for wine growers. What’s mischievousis that his "ministry" issues statements to certain publications on how "unpracticable"NCF recommendations are, trying to put a question mark on NCF’s credibility.Who in the ministry is saying this, he himself? Please explain to us why therecommendations are "unpracticable".

It’s a very frightening situation. Vidarbha is defying the trend that wehave seen in the last few years when there were spurts of suicides in certainseasons. You could clearly see the spikes in Feb-March, then April-May whenfarmers go to purchase inputs for the sowing season ahead. Monsoons have alwaysbeen bad for suicides but this year’s Vidarbha is the worst-ever. The sprayingseason is also bad because that’s when the burdened indebted farmer also has acan of pesticide in his hands…years of frustration and humiliation could justend in a moment. So many deaths have happened in the fields like this.

At the government level, I must say the Vilasrao Deshmukh government has beentotally pathetic. Chief minister Deshmukh and union agriculture minister SharadPawar who is from the state had not even visited a single suicide-affectedfamily or village till they were forced to accompany the PM in late June. Thatitself shows how serious the state government and state leaders perceived thesituation to be, and it wasn’t as if there were no reports. The media waswriting about it, local politicians were bringing it up, sections of thebureaucracy knew what was happening. There was simply no response. Rather, theresponse was contrary to what it should have been.

Take the minimum support price (MSP). This Congress-NCP came to power in October 2004 on the promise that itwould restore the MSP to Rs 2700 per quintal, that’s what they said when MadamGandhi canvassed there for votes. Then, within a year, the government drops theMSP to Rs 1700 per quintal. Just restoring it to the pre-2005 level would havesaved lives this year. Then, they withdrew the advance bonus of Rs 500 perquintal which would have cost the government Rs 1100 crore a year. It’s purelyideological decision but the farmers are paying with their lives for it. Afterall this, the chief minister keeps saying suicides have nothing to do withprices.

Of course. The first instance was in the way they kept fudging suicidefigures. Initially, government officials told the National Human RightsCommission (NHRC) that only 141 farmers had committed suicide between 2001 and2004, then they told the Bombay High Court that 524 had committed suicide in thefour-year period, in October 2005 they told the NCF that the figure was 309 onlyfor Yavatmal. Two months later, the government told the state assembly that 1041farmer suicides had been recorded in the period. Then, of course, the PM wasgiven a figure of 1600 plus in six districts, of which 574 had been recorded inthe last one year, prior to his visit. So, there’s a basic attitude of denial.

That’s topped by a laggard and lackadaisical approach to the situation. Iwill give you just two instances. When the NCF was on its mission to Vidarbha,not a single MLA from the region came to meet the team or talk or be presentanywhere, which was in complete contrast to Kerala when three MLAs from Wayanadregion talked to the NCF team. Then, of course, Mr Pawar visited Vidarbha twodays before the NCF came there but he had apparently come there to canvasvotes from the Vidarbha Cricket Association for BCCI election. He even addresseda press conference but he had no time for dying farmers.

Mr Vasant Purke is the guardian minister, he never visited a single affectedvillage. When he eventually did, it was to a village that he didn’t even knowexisted, people there gave him a piece of their mind. All that the governmenthas done is to stonewall and remain silent. When the numbers piled up and thecrisis became too big to keep quiet, they started instituting teams and commissionsof inquiry. Each one came up with similar findings but they still instituted thenext, hoping that that report will be in their favour. There’s also a collapseof sorts of the local political class.

There’s a larger political game at play. Mr Sharad Pawar wants to be seenas the benefactor of whatever little happens in the farmers’ favour there, sohe pouted and played hard to get when the PM’s visit was announced. He wantedthe relief package to be seen as his doing for the Maharashtra farmer. And thePM was supposed to be a postman delivering it there! Unfortunately for him, itdidn’t work out that way. If the state government does anything for thefarmers, it will be seen as the Congress’ gesture which does not bode well forNCP prospects there in the next election. So, there is indeed a political gamebeing played out there but that’s not what we need to spotlight; doing thatwould take away from the focus on the crisis. There are other aspects ofpolitics too - local leaders, MLAs and others are becoming agents of seedcompanies, they are the new moneylenders, and so on. Politicians are very much apart of the problem.

Oh, there’s a big difference, especially in the last two years. And, theyare both Congress party governments, at least Congress-led governments. Thecrisis there happened or peaked when TDP and Chandrababu Naidu were at the helm.After their 2004 defeat, Naidu, who was hailed as the best reformist chiefminister of the country by international lending institutions, told the worldthat the TDP had failed to make farming community accept the correctness of thereforms but told his party: we lost farmers. If the Congress was back in power,there was a message for it and they seemed to have got at least some things right.Andhra Pradesh is a poorer state than Maharashtra, its Human Development Indexis the worst for the four southern states.

In the two years of YSR Reddy’s tenure as chief minister, severalpro-active steps have been taken. First, they paid compensation to almost 3000farmers which was a big step because this was an acknowledgement of the crisisat a time when the Naidu government was not even willing to say so. The actualfigures of those who should have got compensation were higher, but at least thesesuicides were not disputed. Then, they set up a helpline for farmers and saw toit that calls were taken seriously. Then, they issued ten lakh new Below PovertyLine (BPL) cards and restored the ones that the Naidu government had cancelled.This meant that indebted and impoverished families had some access to foodgrain.

What worked also was that AP agriculture minister has been pro-active on theissues that were in his domain. He was the man who took the multinational seedcompany Monsanto to court over the exorbitant rates they were charging forseeds, under the guise of technology costs. See what happened. Monsanto droppedits price per packet of Bt cotton seed by half. It was a big relief. Thegovernment banned three varieties of seeds. Then, he led raids on moneylenderswho were harassing farmers and forced them into an one-time settlement againstoutstanding loans. There were, and are, issues that are outside the purview ofthe state government like the import duty and so on but at least, the governmentwas seen to be doing something that touched the farmers’ lives in a real way.It restored the confidence of the peasant community. The first few months ofCongress rule may have seen high suicide figures continuing from TDP time, butthe numbers tapered off. What’s surprising is that both AP and Maharashtrahave Congress-led governments and yet there are such deep differences in theirapproach.

There are some trends and patterns that are common. One is that you learn toanticipate the season of suicides and hope that there are none. The sowingseason is one when credit becomes unavailable or too expensive to the farmer andhe sees no further hope. Then, the harvest season when his produce - the littlethat has survived drought, pestilence and everything else - gets a low outputprice which is so low that it often doesn’t even cover the cost. So, what’sleft for the farmer and his family? The lender claims the first right on theproduce. The state-owned marketing agencies and representatives are not to beseen or pay the farmer very little. So, there are seasons of suicides thatpeople like us hope not to see, but know will come upon us.

There’s another frightening trend in Vidarbha that I also noticed in Kerala- so many farmers who committed suicide were experienced farmers, who had beenat it for years together yet saw no light at the end of the tunnel. They werenot novices but had at least 15-20 years of experience of withstanding drought,inhospitable conditions. Many of them had a good elementary education, they hadpassed Class Xth at least. It’s scary when a farmer like this with 20 years ofexperience behind him says: "I am gone, I can’t do it anymore". It showshow we as a nation treat our farming community.

There’s a pattern in the government’s response too. State governments ineach of these states and the central government begin in the denial mode. Theunion agriculture minister dismisses these suicides as a mere 15 per cent of theone lakh suicides in the country every year. This attitude then inhibitseverything else, all other responses. Once the issue becomes too hot to handle,governments get into the dispute mode. They dispute your figures, they institutecommittees and commissions they hope will give them more good-looking figuresbut it doesn’t always happen that way. So, they will keep disputing all othersets of figures but never actually giving their set of numbers. Then,there’s a whole Brahminical analysis of election results and suchlike to showthat there’s no relation of the crisis to political power.

The most "successful" strategy so far for them has been to treat farmers’suicides as separate from the larger agrarian crisis, distinct from ruraldistress. Bad monsoon or drought is a favourite fallback excuse for suicides butwe have had ten-twelve good monsoons now, so that falls flat. Once governmentsacknowledge the crisis, their response is very varied depending on who runs theshow, who calls the shots, who is tied in with what interests and so on. Mostresponses are then ideologically determined - for example, Kerala demanded manyconcessions and got some because all their crops were linked to global trade, APdoes it one way, Punjab yet another (there hasn’t been much media attention onPunjab thought the crisis is as big), Maharashtra another way.

Farmers taking their lives, however heart-rending, are the micro stories.The larger issue is why so many thousands of them have been pushed to such anextreme step, isn’t it?

Every suicide is heart-breaking. The delayed and little media attention isfocused on the suicides, so are many responses. Suicides have to be recorded butthey are not the crises. Suicides are a symptom of the larger and deep agrariancrisis that we as a nation find ourselves in. Governments are still quibblingover the reasons for suicides and setting up committees to find out thosereasons but truth is that we all know the reasons. Vidarbha is not unique, noris any other region. They are part of the larger crisis. And the crisis is thereto see, it is affecting every farm household. The only difference between asuicide and non-suicide household is the loss of the breadwinner but they arefaced with the same set of issues.